


Disappear ino the night sky

by inthisdive



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Comics)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-14
Packaged: 2018-07-15 03:20:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7204775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inthisdive/pseuds/inthisdive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set post-Chosen, post-Not Fade Away, post-Buffy season 8 issue #17. Vague spoilers for all of these things.  Buffy and Spike’s next first kiss comes after Spike’s second death. A bit of a dark reunion. (this was written in 2008)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disappear ino the night sky

The next first for Buffy and Spike comes after Spike’s second death; they are lost in a sequence of numbers, deaths and rebirths. It’s another beginning, another end, because Buffy is only briefly in California, achingly reluctant.

There are too many memories in the area. Too many lost ones, too many lives begun and ended. She leaves Xander with the Slayers and with Dawn, and she bypasses the crater that used to hold her life when she comes back to the state, arriving in the afternoon and the coy, laid-back sunshine. Buffy doesn’t like the sun any more; she rakes her hair over her face to simulate shadow. 

Los Angeles is her destination, the mess she’s been trying to avoid. She knows Angel plunged the city into its blackness, she knows he is probably dead. She knows Wesley is probably gone, too, and she knows that Angel has only made things worse by trying to help. She knows that if he’s alive he’s probably half-dead (more dead), with grief, and she’s surprised that she doesn’t care much more than that. 

Buffy still gets surprised when she can no longer care about things. 

*

When she ventures out into the city proper, it is night and her breathing comes a little easier, her stance more relaxed, less at odds with the surrounds. Everything is more natural to Buffy in the nighttime. She can see better; she can hear herself think. And she needs to think. Her father’s house was empty when she walked by it on an impulse she would later re-tell as patrol, and she remembers, then, she hasn’t called. Hasn’t checked on him. She wonders when he died – she doesn’t entertain any other possibility for his fate. She knows her luck. It’s death. And she slips on new deaths like a warm winter coat, oddly comforting against the harshness to be kept at bay outside. Death is familiar; death is something Buffy knows. 

What she doesn’t know is the new lay of the land. She doesn’t recognize La Cienega Blvd, the crumbling Beverly Center. If she were feeling like Buffy, girl, tonight, she would mourn the loss of the mall, but she doesn’t mourn anything. She feels the stake in her pocket press against her thigh, and she walks, alert, and waits.

*

“Buffy,” someone says, and her name slides above her head in a place she cannot reach with a surprising smoothness, a gentleness that has always surprised her, even after she learned to expect it from the unlikely home of his mouth. 

It’s a voice of someone lost, or so she thought, and without turning around, she says, somewhat wearily, “Spike.” 

He comes over, closer, pushing at her pull, and steps before her. He looks at her, and she can feel him drinking in her sights the way he would her blood, hot and greedy and a little lingering, longing. She stirs, her blood stirs, and soon she’s looking right back at him, the same Spike with heaviness behind his smile. 

“You died,” she says, though she knows she’s not one to talk when it comes to that particular indiscrepancy. She’s not as surprised as she should be to see him. 

“Ended up here,” he replies, something tugging at her through his voice; she remembers his death well, too well, and she’s sick of people, herself included, sacrificing themselves to save and change the world when the future doesn’t know their sacrifices, isn’t made any better by them.

She’s still reeling from meeting Melaka Fray.

None of that needs to be said to Spike, though, he’s studying her face, her breaths, the fall of her hair against her shoulders. And he says, “It’s hell on earth here.”

And Buffy says “Maybe it always was,” and neither of them acknowledge Sunnydale, the actual Hellmouth, the big gaping hole like an elephant in the room of this conversation. This reunion.

“He’s alive,” Spike tells her after a few moments of silence, and that’s neither relief nor elation Buffy feels, but something like resignation. It is good to have an answer, but she’s too unsure about herself, too gray, to process it. Things involving Angel are too big for Buffy and her tiny frame these days; she can’t let herself be swallowed whole. 

“Is he making a difference?” she asks. Spike will tell her either way, and if she could leave here, leave this to him, she could go back to the Slayers and try to change the history books of the future. Or she could just slip away. 

Spike nods, and he’s a vampire, so his two steps forward into Buffy’s space are noiseless and swift. She intuits the move forward, though, expects it. She doesn’t step back. 

“Could do with your help,” he says, and she can feel the absence of his breath on her face and she is relieved; it feels less like she’s crowding her. 

“I have things to do.” Buffy’s reply is measured, and her eyes are on Spike’s, and her hands are on those thin, almost unseeable hips of his, and she doesn’t blink. “I can’t stay.” 

“I know.” Spike’s hand is a gentle comb through her hair, a finger splayed out to catch her cheek in the caress, cold like the breeze. He doesn’t say _I love you_ , because tonight neither of them can bear to hear it. 

What he does instead is this: he kisses her lips in something so chaste a tear almost springs to Buffy’s eye; his lips are parted only slightly, the press of cold, depth and meaning against her own frustratingly yielding warmth. 

It’s Buffy that presses closer, it’s Buffy that, a hand moving to Spike’s back, deepens this into something that tells the story of how they used to be lovers, of something that tastes like ash and memory and too much pain to ever find true solace. 

It’s only a moment, they both know that. It’s only this moment Buffy has given with her tongue, the tilt of her jaw, and Spike responds. It’s one moment where she pushes, just once, and Spike responds, and in mere minutes they will turn and walk away from each other, because they have their own battles to fight, their separate redemptions to seek. 

It is one moment. 

For one moment, this moment, in a street dressed in ruins, they cling to each other, lost in their loss. 

*


End file.
